by Shaw Sander
“Gitta, are you feeling alright?” I recovered myself enough to ask, calculating her age and the risk factors.
“Oh, good Lord,” Larry cried, swinging into action, “of course, what am I thinking? Omigod, I feel like Dick Van Dyke all of a sudden. Gitta, sit down, sit down, put your feet up, let me get you an ottoman, no, take this chair, it’s much better, better back support. And no booze for you, young lady.”
Drake took Gitta’s untouched Mimosa and replaced it with fresh juice.
“I feel fine. I’m on all the pre-natal vitamins, and the morning sickness is almost gone, too. The specialist says I should be fine but there’s a lot of extra precautions anyway. We’ve looked into the whole thing. The amnio says the baby’s fine. We’re gonna sell my house and get a place together, start the marriage with this new life. I feel so…honored to be given another chance, to do it over again. We certainly didn’t ask for this or plan it but this baby must want very badly to be born.”
“Why do you say that?” I wondered, thinking people get pregnant all the time.
“Jerry had a vasectomy years ago. He didn’t want to procreate with his unbalanced wife.”
Jerry nodded his head and shrugged his shoulders, smiling proudly despite himself.
“You’ll be….how old when the kid graduates from high school?”
“Just…old. No matter. Life put this in our path so we’re going with it. If my age makes me lose the baby, then so be it. But we’ll protect it as fiercely as we can.”
“What a wonderful story,” Larry sniffed.
“You can order from Hanna Anderson again!” I laughed. “Her boys had the most stylish baby clothes of anyone I’d ever seen.”
“They’re Scandinavian clothes, bright colors, really practical, all cotton.” Gitta smiled.
“I hope it’s a girl,” I said, wishing for a Gitta mini-me.
“Birgitte,” Simon said, smiling a bit. “This means you have a granddaughter who will be older than your own child.”
“Yup. Ariel’s great-aunt or uncle will be younger than her.”
“Well, we’ll sort all that out as we go along,” Jerry said, squeezing Birgitta’s shoulders.
Her tits looked bigger, now that I thought about it. That’s why she looked different. No wonder Simon noticed.
Jerry changed the attention back to us.
“So Simon, how long have you been planning this wedding?”
“I meant it when I said I saw Annalee on t.v. and I knew.”
“Me, too. I saw Gitta and I had to have her.”
Jerry kissed the top of Gitta’s silky head.
Simon squeezed my hand.
“I was thinking instead of a big-ass ring, we could buy another house, Al. I have the GI Bill, which means I get a good loan. You want real estate or a ring?”
Simon grinned at me. He knew what I’d say. We loved to look at the real estate ads, and sometimes dropped in on Sunday open houses for fun.
“I’ll take the house, for sure. Can we rent mine out? I want to keep it for the kids. They grew up there. So did I, really. We can get a gold band. And let’s go to Victoria. That sounds nice.”
“Cinnamon rolls are ready, everyone.” Larry clapped his hands and ordered us to grab a plate. We were going to lounge all around the comfy livingroom furniture instead of formally dining at table. Everything was spread buffet style, and it all looked marvelous.
“Wait!” Drake yelled suddenly as we headed toward the gorgeous translucent green china plates. I wondered for a split second if he was going to pray.
We all stood still, waiting as he ran to the other room and came back, fiddling with a camera.
“Seconds away, hold on,” he said. “Now stand back there by the table, Jerry, you and Simon in back since you’re taller, and Larry, take off your apron and stand between the girls. Leave a slot for me to crouch below, hang on, I’m setting the timer and…go!” he said, tearing off his apron and rushing to get into the picture before the timer went off, all of us frozen in place.
“Say Farrah Fawcett-Majors!” Larry sang as the flash went off and the house phone rang.
Picture done, Drake answered the phone.
“Well, what excellent timing,” he said into the phone, then held it up in the air. “Hey, everybody, it’s Malcolm!”
My seniority got me five days off for our MLK Day wedding.
The honors were done at Larry’s lovely home by a mail-order Universal Life minister, perfectly legal in Washington. Simon wore a white Nehru jacket with engraved brass buttons going all Ben-Casey down one side. My street-length black velvet wedding dress had an open back and a lot of leg show and the black ostrich feather comb in my hair lent an exotic air.
Gitta was my witness, her baby bump starting to show on her tiny frame.
Malcolm the best man flew in alone to sign off on our marriage license as a witness, kiss the bride and slap Simon on the back.
Jerry, Larry and Drake stood nearby, everyone dressed to the nines.
Simon’s two children, Will and Suzette, as well as my own two, had cheerily wished us well by phone. None of them could get the time off. Someday we would all be in the same room, a sudden family-by-marriage.
.
The Blue Canoe catered our little party at Larry’s so no one would have to cook and we even got an employee discount on account of Malcolm. He regaled us with wild Alaskan tales all starting with “Swear to God, this really happened…”
Malcolm’s wife Bernie was enjoying braving the elements with two big Malamutes and being out in the toolies, he said, as long as they had high-speed internet and UPS deliveries. She had to shop, no matter where she lived. I imagined Alaska required a whole new wardrobe, which had probably made her really happy.
“She really wanted to come,” Malcolm said and we all nodded, but we knew it wasn’t true. She hadn’t fit well into the group, coming in too late, Malcolm’s role carved out without her. Frankly, we were relieved to see him alone, brash and ribald, the man he was when she wasn’t around, telling exaggerated stories of the last frontier.
It was also nice to see Malcolm from my wonderful new vantage point as his old friend’s newly-minted wife. I took his hand across the table.
“Thanks for introducing us, Malcolm,” I told him. “You got me a husband, just like you said you would. Made an honest woman out of me.”
“And a captain of industry at that, mama. Man, you gonna take care of this little lady in the style in which she’d like to become accustomed?” Malcolm wise-cracked, taking his hand away from me and slapping Simon on the arm.
“She can have it any way she wants it, long as she keeps cookin’ for me. Jesus, have you tasted her cookies? Or her cheesecake?”
“Why, yes I have,” Malcolm slyly said, his mouth moving a toothpick to one side and avoiding my gaze so hard I could feel it.
The two men locked eyes.
A pissing contest could start, if they wanted to get into it, depending on everyone’s attitude. We’d all had a few drinks.
I waited without moving, the two alpha males staring each other down over a food allegory.
Simon leaned forward, looking Malcolm in the eye.
“And its fine, ain’t it brother?” he smiled, his eyes sparkling. They stared a second longer. “Too bad you already married or you’d have kept her sweet ass for your own!”
Both men burst out laughing and shook hands across the table.
“You a’ight, man, I don’t care what ever’body say,” Malcolm teased him.
“Yeah, I gotcha, brother. I’ll help pull you up outta that mess you call a life. What the fuck you doin’ in Alaska anyway? Only brother for five hundred miles, I’ll bet.”
“ ’Member how you took Home Ec to be around all the girls? Well, my friend, it’s a black man’s wet dream up there. White women every-fucking-where and how many brothers? My dick thinks it died and went to heaven. Looking only. But heaven, man.”
The braided gold wedding band was
just the right weight on my finger. It felt so new that it distracted me when I held a steering wheel and when I wrote, my fingers hitting the wrong keys. Covered with dish suds it practically twinkled at me. My thumb kept twirling it around and around.
I loved being married.
Suddenly I was Mrs. CWO4 Ret. Simon Battles and it was wonderful. It felt weighty, a title legally connecting me to a man of means.
I was exactly the same person but as a lesbian I hadn’t had the same right. It angered me that Larry and Drake couldn’t have what we had: next of kin spousal status. Because we were allowed an ecclesiastical pronouncement and a signed register at City Hall, The Defense of Marriage Act accorded Simon and me any or all of the
“…total of 1,138 federal statutory provisions classified to the United States Code in which marital status is a factor in determining or receiving benefits, rights, and privileges…”
I had also married a retired military man, giving me even more benefits and privileges.
If Simon dropped dead, I had his benefits and pension for the rest of my natural life.
The world felt easier as a married woman, buffered by a strong support. My brain rested in his butch skill-set, comfortable knowing that no electrical malfunction, roof leak or car breakdown was too big for him to repair, no gizmo at Home Depot too hard to find. Sunday mornings would be full of sex and afterward, pajamas in the living room to read the paper. We’d confidently push forward together, a united front, socially stroked for being part of the mainstream.
Everything felt…lighter.
“She’s doing somersaults in the middle of the night and waking me up. And her kicks are like clockwork, four a.m. I haven’t had a night’s sleep all the way through in two months. It’s like she’s making sure I know she’s coming.”
Gitta was rubbing her basketball of a belly, her long blond hair resting on her swollen breasts. She couldn’t drink coffee so we were having hot cider. The chilly spring rains were pouring downtown.
Two more months to go before the rest of us could meet Inga but Gitta seemed to know her well already.
“Jerry can’t wait. She’ll be his first child.”
“His ex-wife was kinda off the deep end, wasn’t she?”
“Yup. Fortunately he learned a lot about dysfunction in the first marriage so he came pre-therapized.”
“Simon, too. Requires very little tuning. Isn’t it nice?”
“It’s nice to be so happy. Our kitchen cabinets are getting put into the new house this weekend and Jerry’s painting the nursery a warm yellow with duckies everywhere. It’s so sweet. I love the tiny baby clothes now! And the maternity clothes now are actually attractive. Remember the smocked blouses with the Peter-Pan white collars we had to wear? It’s way different than when we were having kids back in the day. How’s your house hunt?”
Simon had moved into my place when we married, leaving most of his stuff in boxes in Peanut’s old room until we found a place of our own.
“Not bad. Lots down south where we’re comfortable, but the prices are climbing. We haven’t got that big a down payment, just our tax returns, but I think we’ll find something soon. He wants to live near the water and that’s out of range. I want more bedrooms so I can have an office. It’s hard to write now with someone else in the house. I’ve lived alone for a long time. That’s the only thing that’s hard about being married. He never goes home.”
“I have hardly any time to think about it. Between work, doctor appointments and trying to get enough rest, I barely have a minute to remember what it was like to be un-pregnant and un-married. Sometimes I want to take the pregnancy off for a minute, set it aside and go do a few things. It feels like an alien eating me alive from the inside.”
“Everything okay, though? No problems so far?”
“Nope. Gonna be fine.”
“How’s the boys? How’s Ariel?”
“The boys are still stuck in the war machine. I am afraid to read the paper. They’re freaked out at having a little half-sister but they’ll get over it. Ariel’s got a new tooth, from what the group email said, and the picture was cute in a Kmart kind of way. I’ll get used to being a grandmother, I guess. How’s Dew?”
“Like nothing ever happened.”
“And Peanut?”
“Loves the gardening gig. She’s cut back on school, going part time now. I think she wants to drag it out, make it last.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“When’s Inga due again?”
“End of April.”
“You’ll do fine.”
“I better. I’m too old to screw this up. Larry is hiring me to work at the Foundation as his Girl Friday. I can draw a salary while I am lounging around in my pajamas, answering the phone for him and opening mail. I left my “real” job and now I’ll be able to bring the baby to work. He’s just trying to shield my pride, since he has offered to support me completely and I’d feel so useless that way, so he proposed I have a title and a position, though it really means very little. It just preserves my working dignity, is all. And I like the idea of being a Girl Friday.”
“So you quit your job to stay home and work part-time for Larry?”
“Yes ma’am. Careful what you wish for.”
“I’m envious. I hate FedEx and working outside. I get so tired all the time and I want to have time to create. I know I can make a go of writing for money if I had the time. Working is wearing me out.”
“It’ll happen, darling.”
“I make a mean cheesecake, too, so I may get a little bakery thing going on in the meantime. Try to bring down real money doing something I like. I can rent commercial kitchen space. Already wrote the business plan.”
“And it will be called…?”
“Baked In Seattle.”
“Love the double entendre! Sounds perfect.”
“I just wanna grow tomatoes,” Peanut exhaled into the phone.
“Please think about finishing college. Remember your mother? How she works 12 hours a day at a manual labor job because she never went to college?”
“You make good money at FedEx, Mommy. I make okay money growing tomatoes and I’m happy. Weren’t you happy working for FedEx?”
Happy humping sixty-pound boxes in the freezing rain up a loading dock ramp or three flights of Pioneer Square stairs? Not unhappy, really, since I could eat whatever I wanted and not fluctuate in weight. I stayed strong. I worked alone in my own head, no boss shouting in my ear once I left the building in the morning. My flight benefits had given me visitation when the children were small that I never would have been able to swing.
But had I had a degree? Shit, I’d have taught school so as to be on the childrens’ school schedule. Or I’d have gone into journalism, writing for a living. Or a million other things that open easily when you can say yes, you are a college graduate.
A high school diploma got me locked into a grueling profession that ate every muscle and bone in the body. Running on adrenalin, Starbucks, road rage and impossible deadlines, my job demanded functioning at a crisis level, making sudden adjustments for weather, late freight, or traffic impediments. On my right hip was my FedEx scanner, clipboard and my pager, my corporate ID was on a lanyard around my neck and in my pockets were pens, door tags, a two-inch thick Service Reference Guide, mints, lipstick, dog treats, my driver’s license and Fitness For Duty state medical examiner ID. I carried a huge FedEx blue bag filled with my purse, enough food and drink for the 12-hour day, my FedEx sweater and raincoat, a spare pair of dry socks, a spare inhaler, two rolls of Astra printer labels, and my lunchtime novel. My office was a 1992 Grumman with a diamond-plate floor, every surface covered in thick, oily dust. I made seven dollars less an hour than unionized UPS drivers.
“Please think about finishing college, Peanut.”
“I’ma take a break, Mom. Everything’s gonna be fine. I have my own health insurance now that I’m an assistant manager. You found your way. I will, too, okay? Stop worry
ing.”
“You talked to your brother lately?”
“Yes, last night. He’s coming up next weekend to visit the dog. We share custody.”
Peanut giggled.
“Well, it’s important you put your differences aside and do what’s best for the dog,” I said dryly.
She laughed out loud.
“Long as Dew doesn’t go crazy again and give him mushrooms like last time. What are you writing these days, Mommy?”
“Nothing much. Still adjusting to the new marriage. I don’t have a room or an alone-space to write so nothing’s coming to me. It goes underground. We’re looking for a new house. It’ll happen.”
Time gently passed. Drake’s wounds finally healed. Inga couldn’t wait to be born, making The Seattle Times since she was delivered by Jerry and a doctor in the next car while the Ballard Bridge was up. Malcolm kept promising to visit.
We decided to stay at the little house.
I’d gotten the place over a decade before, full of cobwebs and broken glass and had worked hard to make it a showplace, down to the antique lace curtains I’d bought once upon a time. It was absolutely as charming as the first time I’d walked in the front door and I hoped that Simon liked living here with me. I figured he’d claim it more as his own once he swung a sledgehammer through a wall or two to build his long-awaited addition. Bring it on, I said to myself. He would only improve the place.
And hadn’t I gone full-circle, wanting a handsome man at the hardware store to share my little dream house, and poof, here we were?
“Happy?” Simon asked, as he gathered an armload of firewood to warm the place up. It was raining buckets and staying home sounded great.
“What do you want to do about dinner? And yes, very happy,” I said, looking out the front window at the property, blurred by rain and grey skies.
“I want it to magically appear. Let’s call out for pizza,” he kissed my head.
